Contents tagged with General Software Development

Yesterday I was looking for some C# analysis tools, but they either were very expensive or came with add-ins like Resharper. Nothing against these add-ins except that I'm not very fond of having loads of extensions in my IDE as it feels like they slow down the IDE too much at times. That can be me, or the solutions I work with, that doesn't really matter, I simply can't stand the slowness. There's however a solution for that, Jetbrains have been so kind to release their Resharper analysis engine as a free commandline tool. This tool does all the analysis solution wide like Resharper but when I want it to do so, which is excellent. The downside is… it produces an xml file which isn't that useful without some tool.

This is the second post about fetch performance of various .NET ORM / data-access frameworks. The first post, which has lots of background information can be found here. In this second post I'll post new results, including results from frameworks which were included after the previous post. The code used is available on GitHub. I'd like to thank Jonny Bekkum for adding benchmark code for many of the frameworks which were added after the previous post.

There has been some talk around several internet outlets about the (seemingly) eroding trust developers have in Microsoft and its techniques (see David Sobeski's piece here, Tim Anderson's piece here and e.g. the Reddit Programming thread here). Trust is the keyword here and in my opinion it's essential to understand what that means in the context of a software developer to understand the problem at hand, or even to acknowledge that there is / isn't a problem. I try to explain below what I think trust means in this context.

Code-first. It's a way of defining mappings for O/R mappers by hand-writing entity classes and then hand-writing mapping files (either by using shortcuts like conventions or by a fluent api which allows you to setup the mappings rather quickly) to a database which might not exist yet. I find using that kind of system rather odd. The thing is that O/R mapping is about an abstract entity definition which is realized in both a class definition and a table/view definition, in such a way that there is a mapping definable between the two definitions (class and table) so instances of the abstract entity definition (the data!) can flow between instances of the two definitions: from a table row to an entity class instance and back or vice versa. The work needed to perform that flow of entity instances is done by an O/R mapper.

I'm proud to announce we've released v4.0 of LLBLGen Pro! This release is the 13th full release we've done and it arrives in the year LLBLGen Pro turns 10. As always we've packed the new release with great new features and I hope we've added what you wanted us to add. You can find what's new here: http://www.llblgen.com/pages/whatsnew.aspx

Yesterday, Microsoft revealed that the Windows Store is now open to all developers in a wide range of countries and locations. For the people who think "wtf is the 'Windows Store'?", it's the central place where Windows 8 users will be able to find, download and purchase applications (or as we now have to say to not look like a computer illiterate: <accent style="Kentucky">aaaaappss</accent>) for Windows 8.